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Kurds Savor Golden Age That May Prove Fleeting

''Welcome to free Kurdistan, my friend!'' cried the grinning boatman, Adnan, as he pulled away from the Syrian side of the Tigris River in the converted rowboat that serves as the ferry to the other Iraq, the one outside the dismal grip of Saddam Hussein.

The boat itself, powered by a spluttering engine and clearing the water by only inches, serves as a metaphor for the self-governing domain the Kurds have established in northern Iraq. The craft's patched-together fragility, as well as the pervasive geniality of the boatman and his assistants, captures much of what the Kurds have accomplished in the past 10 years.

The Iraqi Kurds' domain, at the meeting point of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, is a far cry from the Iraq controlled by Mr. Hussein. To enter that Iraq, south of the no-flight zone patrolled by American and British warplanes that have kept Iraqi troops and authority from the Kurdish region since 1991, is to encounter sullen warnings, the menace of border officials and the darkness that Mr. Hussein's 23-year rule has cast across the rest of the country.

In the northern territory, a Switzerland-size crescent covering about a tenth of Iraq, the Kurds have come as close as ever to their centuries-old dream of building their own nation. Hemmed in by a longstanding resolve among Arabs, Persians and Turks to deny the 25 million Kurds of this region a state of their own, the Kurds of Iraq are savoring their freedoms, yet deeply uneasy about new political crosscurrents swirling across the territory.

Never truly secure as long as their domain exists outside international law and is unrecognized by the Iraqi Constitution, the Kurds are faced now with a new problem growing out of President Bush's vow to oust Mr. Hussein. In effect, the American plan proposes to upend the Iraqi chessboard, and many Kurds fear that, whatever happens, they may lose much of the autonomy they now enjoy.

For now, though, the trip that starts at Peshkhabor is relaxed in a way that Mr. Hussein's Iraq has never been. The only threat is a few miles downstream, where the Iraqi ruler's armored columns maintain a brooding vigil, broken occasionally by sniper fire and mortar shells that kill and maim Kurdish farmers, smugglers and others who enter the neutral zone between the Kurdish front-line fighters known as peshmergas (meaning ''those who face death'') and Iraqi troops.

In the territory, a mostly Kurdish population of 3.6 million people, about a sixth of Iraq's population, lives amid a landscape of stunning beauty: to the south, the ancient cities of Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaimaniya lying on the rim of the oil-rich desert; to the north, the great plain rising into folded foothills and soaring mountains, carpeted with golden wheat fields, dark woods and a blaze of wildflowers in red and blue and yellow.

It is a remarkable if improbable place, a sort of dreamland for the Kurds. Seeking precedents in their long history of repression, they cite Kurdish principalities that sprang up in this region between the 16th and 19th centuries, when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Turks. But even those distant times, the Kurds say, pale beside what exists today. Everywhere in the north, Kurds refer to the present as their golden age.

They rule a region that is 250 miles wide and at places 125 miles deep, bordered by Syria to the west, Turkey to the north, and Iran to the east. Within these boundaries, the Kurds say, they have created freedoms unknown in Iraq since the state's founding in 1921: the foundations for a civil society, that, they say, exists to the same degree nowhere else in the Arab-dominated world.

The closest parallel, these Kurds say, is Israel -- a country many Kurds strongly support, even though they are mostly Muslims, because of a sense of affinity with the Jews' long quest for a homeland and because of a shared sense of the peril posed by Mr. Hussein. The parallel is extended to the Palestinians, who, many Kurds say, achieved much less with the autonomy granted to them after the Oslo accords of 1993 than Kurds have achieved here.

''An idea is born here: The Middle East could be different,'' said Barham Salih, 41, a British-educated Muslim who heads the government of one of the Kurds' political entities, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the territory's eastern half. To the west, a separate regional government operates under the control of a rival group, the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Carving Out a Free Zone

In both regions, there are opposition parties and dozens of free-ranging newspapers and satellite television channels, as well as international telephone calls and Internet cafes where people are free to visit any Web site they like. All this is banned or restricted in Mr. Hussein's Iraq, where, for example, Internet cafes are open only to those with police permits, and then only for access to approved Web sites.

In their ''liberated territory,'' the ruling Kurdish groups allow even Mr. Hussein's state-controlled newspapers to be sold and Baghdad's television channels to be shown, on the principle, as one Kurdish official explained it, that ''it gives our people a chance to laugh at Saddam's propaganda, where once they would have cried.''

The Kurdish-controlled territory is notable, too, for the absence of the apparatus of repression that has turned Mr. Hussein's Iraq into a terror state. The old secret police buildings -- testaments to the torture, rape and killing by Mr. Hussein's enforcers that have been chronicled in scores of Western human rights reports -- sit abandoned now, or have been turned to benign uses.

The Kurds have no special courts, and claim to have no political prisoners.

In this Iraq, the United States and Britain are hailed as liberators, for the daily patrolling of Kurdish skies that has cost the two countries nearly $10 billion to maintain. When children here wave at aircraft tracing vapor trails high above, they are saluting the powers that banished, with the no-flight zone, the terrors of Mr. Hussein. But the Kurds also fear that they are powers now pushing them toward a new confrontation that could threaten all they have gained.

When President Bush began saying this year that Mr. Hussein ''has got to go,'' because of intelligence reports that he continues to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that could be handed to terrorist groups, he effectively placed the Kurds on notice that the days of self-rule, or at least the days of operating outside Iraq's political structures, might be ending.

In recent months, groups of intelligence agents, military advisers and government officials from the United States and Britain have been making clandestine visits to the Kurdish-controlled territory. Many of those trips have been in the unmarked black helicopters that fly important visitors on secret flights from Turkey. At secret locations, Kurdish officials say, these shadowy visitors have been mapping out ways the Kurds can assist in the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

So far, Kurdish officials say, they have been given no details of the Americans' plans beyond being told that there will be no attack before next year. This tallies with reports from Washington, where the Pentagon is said to have concluded that a military offensive, involving as many as 250,000 American troops along with bases in as many as eight neighboring countries, will take at least that long to prepare. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency is said to be exploring ways of toppling Mr. Hussein by a military coup.

Few people would have more reason than Iraqi Kurds to hail the demise of Mr. Hussein, who attacked them with poison gas when they allied themselves with Iran during the two nations' war in the 1980's, then killed thousands of other Kurds in the crackdown that followed a failed Kurdish uprising after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Few conversations here end without a tally of the family members and friends numbered among the dead.

The Enemy of Their Enemy

But as the Kurds see it, Mr. Bush is now asking them to bear the greatest risks. Concerns about an offensive have a personal edge: Many Kurds are deeply bitter that the first President Bush encouraged a Kurdish uprising against Mr. Hussein immediately after the gulf war, then failed to support it until a million Kurds had fled to Turkey. That exodus prompted the United Nations to declare a safe haven for the returning refugees, and the United States and Britain to impose the no-flight zone.

The fear is that a new American war could founder, leaving the Kurds exposed to the full might of Iraqi reprisals as American troops withdrew; or that Mr. Hussein might make a pre-emptive strike into the Kurdish-controlled areas to deny the Americans use of the Kurdish area as a base.

''Saddam is still the same; with Bush, only the 'W' is different from the father,'' said Fadil Mirani, a member of a hard-line group within the leadership of the Kurdistan Democratic Party that is most wary of Washington's plans.

''We don't have the luxury of the policy wonks in Washington,'' said Mr. Salih, who last year completed 10 years as the Patriotic Union's representative in Washington, with close links to many of the C.I.A., Pentagon and State Department planners now working on Mr. Bush's strategy. ''They can afford to make mistakes; we cannot. We live here; they do not.''

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Just as keenly, the Kurds fear that the very ''regime change'' that Mr. Bush advocates could replace one dictator with another. Washington has always favored a strongman government in Baghdad, Kurds say, as a counterweight to the Islamic radicalism of Iran's ayatollahs and as the kind of leadership capable of holding Iraq and its fractious Shiite, Kurdish and Arab populations together.

Kurds presume that a new Iraqi ruler would come from the same Sunni Arab minority as Mr. Hussein, Iraq's traditional ruling class, and would be far from certain to support the kind of autonomy the Kurds now enjoy. Leaders of the Arab-dominated opposition to Mr. Hussein, many of them living in Britain and the United States, have mostly been vague in response to the Kurds' demands that they commit themselves to Kurdish autonomy within a democratic federal system for a future Iraq.

So anguished have the Kurds become that they have subordinated some of the rivalry between the ruling parties and presented the Bush administration with what they say is a blunt message: guarantee our freedoms in a future Iraq, or count us out.

''Saddam is a man of infinite cruelty, he is an evil man,'' said Hamida Fandi, a 70-year-old veteran of Kurdish guerrilla campaigns who is the defense minister in Erbil. ''But however evil he may be, the Kurdish people cannot be expected to sacrifice their freedoms to America's desire to eliminate him.''

But other senior Kurdish leaders have argued for unequivocal support for the bid to topple Mr. Hussein, figuring it will go ahead with or without them. ''What we have here is a bubble, a comfortable bubble to be sure, but still a bubble,'' one official in Sulaimaniya said. ''We are utterly dependent for our survival on the United States and Britain. So if we have a chance to join the Americans in getting rid of Saddam and building a new, democratic Iraq, we must take it.''

Most Kurds, however, seem to see the status quo -- Mr. Hussein in power in Baghdad, Western air power keeping him at bay -- as their best bet.

In private, most acknowledge, as do their leaders, that the age-old dream of a Kurdish state encompassing minorities in Syria, Turkey and Iran, as well as Iraq, is foreclosed by those states' implacable opposition and by an American veto. Failing that goal, they say that the freedoms of the past decade may be the most they can attain.

''Of course we wish we had a chance to have an independent state, but we have accepted our fate, that we are condemned to live as part of the state called Iraq,'' one top Kurdish leader said.

If few of the Kurds' old enemies in Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara are ready to believe that resignation, Washington evidently is, judging by remarks made in Istanbul two weeks ago by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the Bush administration's leading hawks on Iraq. While urging Turkey's support for Mr. Hussein's overthrow, Mr. Wolfowitz in effect argued that the country should abandon its suspicions about the Iraqi Kurds. ''A separate Kurdish state in the north would be destabilizing to Turkey, and would be unacceptable to the United States,'' he said.

''Fortunately, the Kurds of northern Iraq increasingly seem to understand this fact,'' he said, ''and understand the importance of thinking of themselves as Iraqis who will participate fully in the political life of a future democratic Iraq.''

Still, many Kurds would prefer not to take on Mr. Hussein. Those who take this view cite an equilibrium -- brittle, but surprisingly enduring through the past five years -- that has developed between the Kurdish territory and Mr. Hussein's Iraq. The relationship has become as much one of cooperation as confrontation.

A Strange Coexistence

The proof is available at crossing points like Chamchamal, on the desert floor about 40 miles outside Sulaimaniya. Here, Kurds travel south to Baghdad or Kirkuk, an oil city, for medical treatment that is not available in the Kurdish region, or to trade truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables. Northbound, traders in battered trucks and cars carry auto parts, furniture, toys, household equipment and a host of other products.

Both sides charge customs duties, and bribes are common. Kurdish officials check northbound Iraqi travelers against lists of known Iraqi agents. ''We Kurds will never trust the Iraqis, as long as Saddam is in power,'' said Latif Hamid, a border guard checking and rechecking the identity cards of Arab Iraqis arriving at Chamchamal. ''We can never forget what they have done.''

But identity checks aside, it is mostly an open frontier for anybody on either side who dares to cross it.

To the west, tanker trucks loaded with Iraqi oil run north to Turkey, cutting through the Kurdish region. In one 15-minute period, a traveler counted more than 60 trucks heading up the highway from Mosul to the Turkish border, part of a traffic that United Nations officials estimate at 1,500 tankers a day. This traffic runs in defiance of United Nations sanctions that place all Iraqi oil sales under United Nations supervision, with the revenues to be spent on things like food, medicines and reparations to Kuwait.

For Mr. Hussein, the illicit oil yields huge sums -- as much as $2 billion a year, by some estimates. The money sustains the pampered lifestyle of the Baghdad elite, and Western intelligence agencies believe that it also pays for some of Mr. Hussein's weapons programs.

But the oil traffic is no less a bonanza for the Kurds, who receive an Iraqi toll on every truck. Before Baghdad cut its oil production sharply this year as part of the dispute over the United Nations sanctions, the tolls brought Kurds as much as $1 million a day.

Some Kurdish officials believe it has suited Mr. Hussein to help the Kurdish territories survive. He has enough problems, they say, without having to govern the restive Kurds because he needs to concentrate on his power base -- the Kirkuk oil fields just south of the Kurdish territory, the Iraqi heartland around Baghdad, and the rich oil fields of the south, around Basra. ''He gave a part to save the whole,'' Mr. Abdurrahman said. ''But if he'd foreseen how successful we've been, he wouldn't have done it.''

Now, Kurds say, with almost two-thirds of the Kurdish population under the age of 25 and increasingly accustomed to their freedoms, any Iraqi government would have trouble curtailing them.

But sheltered as they are from Mr. Hussein, the Kurds seldom criticize him openly, wary that he might one day return. Although Mr. Hussein is loathed, said Mr. Salih, of the Patriotic Union, ''he remains our constant shadow.''

''When we turn around, he is always there,'' he said. ''The last thing we want to do is to provoke him, and invite another onslaught against our people.''